Holst’s The Planets with Brian Cox

[Richard Barrett]

I like Colin Matthews work Pluto. A very good description of how the planet is.

How can a piece of music be a description of a planet?

[Stanfordian]

How can a piece of music be a description of a planet?

If he says it evokes Pluto for him!

[Richard Barrett]

If he says it evokes Pluto for him!

Evoking something and describing it aren't really the same thing at all, are they?

[Stanfordian]

Evoking something and describing it aren't really the same thing at all, are they?

[Serial_Apologist]

Evoking something and describing it aren't really the same thing at all, are they?

The first comes from rubbing antique urns; the second from writing fiction about it and making a reputation longterm, if not a lot of money out of it!

[BBMmk2]

You’ve e always heard about descriptive music, say in tone/symphonic poems, or programme music. Ballet music is descriptive as well.

[Pabmusic]

This is all a bit hard. What any music conjures up - or just seems to fit - will vary from person to person.

[Richard Barrett]

This is all a bit hard. What any music conjures up - or just seems to fit - will vary from person to person.

Clearly. But describing a planet? - especially when the composer himself has said this isn't what he was trying to do, even in Holst's astrological terms, and when there were no detailed images of Pluto until fifteen years after it was written? That seems a bit of a stretch to me.

[Pabmusic]

Clearly. But describing a planet? - especially when the composer himself has said this isn't what he was trying to do, even in Holst's astrological terms, and when there were no detailed images of Pluto until fifteen years after it was written? That seems a bit of a stretch to me.

Well, yes. But BBM was not talking about Holst, but Matthews.

[Bryn]

Well, yes. But BBM was not talking about Holst, but Matthews.

So was Richard, I think you should be able to deduce from the 15 years reference.

[MrGongGong]

How can a piece of music be a description of a planet?

I think you are supposed to think that music is a "language"

[Lat-Literal]

Ooh, I dunno - from his pen name he sounds like he might well be a Messiaen freak!

How about Sun Ra's "Space is the Place"?

I thought Sun Ra, too.

Maybe I am getting this wrong but he seems to be suggesting that in Holst's time it was thought that Mars could contain life that was an enemy; at the time of LBJ and Mariner it was deemed inhospitable and moon like; and now it seems to be a place where life could have been and which human beings could inhabit. We must remember that Holst composed in a pre nuclear age. In the 1960s, the atomic threat was such that it was necessary to convey the enemy as being on earth and crucially that should the bomb be dropped there was no escape. Realism as defence. Today, the caving in to thoughts that proliferation can't be stopped requires a narrative that escape is possible and the route is one in which humans could thrive.

I am extremely doubtful about this sort of stuff. As I have said time and again, I think that science is a lens, it is a language, and it is interpretation. But in all of these things I am not so sure that it is anything more substantial than art. Nor am I any more believing in this era where fake news is out in the open that what is presented of astronomy is "truer" than at any time before. I am no flag carrier for astrology. I once did have leanings but would be best described today as agnostic. Nevertheless, intellectual arguments are not strong when it is dismissed as here as "Mystic Meg". To go into it in any detail - and he would know so he is being duplicitous or angled - is much more involved than that and interestingly rarely political.

On a slightly weirder level - and I have tried my luck with this before and just about got away with it - the idea of of us all having little knowledge about the universe that can then be filled with exploration is an absolute pictorial projection of the lack of knowledge - or at least a labelling for unknowns - in the first place. To that extent, the populating of a so-called universe with so-called facts is a filling out of the ignorant mysteries in the human brain. It might well be actively pursed but that pursuance may actually be a part of the imagination, just as everything might be, albeit reinforced to truth by common consensus that could otherwise be described as hysteria. Astrology actually goes the other way. It assumes a pulling in or towards, whether we like it or not. That there is something in the water and the water is not just external but in us. In each case, it is hard not to see mirrors here working this way and that, albeit ones in which verbal language and activity are so prevalent we can't see that is what they are. A some goes out. A some goes in. And it a all goes around and around.

I doubt Buddhists would be bothered by any of it.

(See, not that he realises it consciously : I don't think he is the game of modern enlightenment; rather he is seeking to factually contextualise so as to reassure; but I'm not reassured)